Posts tagged: Nikolai Bukharin

In 2006, the Economist newspaper declared in a survey of Mexico that it was “time to wake up”, meaning that reforms in the energy sector (oil and electricity) must resume to set the economy free by making the most of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [see November 18, 2006]. Further, as the old political model had died with the defeat of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) it was time for a new one to be born and time, also, for the real president in Felipe Calderón of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), to stand up. That was 2006. In 2012, the Economist offers us its latest survey of Mexico. Now the country is on the rise and “going up” in the world following the election of Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI with the agenda to be set by further economic restructuring in, yes, the energy sector [see November 24, 2012]. So what has changed and how can one assess the major transformations shaping Latin America’s second largest economy?

Back in 2010 I was fortunate enough to be invited by Ian Bruff to present various papers at the Standing Group on International Relations (SGIR) 7th Pan-European International Relations Conference in Stockholm (7-9 September 2010). Amongst my presentations was my participation in a roundtable discussion on Antonio Gramsci along with various people, including Mark Rupert and Owen Worth. My intervention was entitled ‘Gramsci’s Method’ and it attempted to outline an approach to reading Gramsci by bouncing off some ideas drawn from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). I had been reading that book over the summer and it reminded me of various insights in the Prison Notebooks on issues of method and epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. As a snappy intervention that raised some specific questions about method and hermeneutic understanding in approaching the reading of texts, I thought it might be worthwhile to relay the content of that roundtable presentation here, not least as it links with some forthcoming publications of mine.

Is the heat in Mexico’s presidential election increasing on Enrique Peña Nieto as candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)? Coming into the final week of the election on July 1, it is suggested that he is a comfortable front runner ahead by 10 points in the opinion polls in relation to his nearest rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). Since 2000, Mexico has been governed by the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). But with the PAN under President Felipe Calderón mired in the “war on drugs” that has cost some 60,000 lives since 2006, the party’s candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota is struggling to define a sense of difference in her campaign. With security such a hot topic in Mexico, one of Peña Nieto’s policy proposals is to create a paramilitary gendarmerie of 40,000 recruited from the army. In that sense it could well be a case of from the frying PAN into the fire of the PRI.